Reviews by bow_doubt

I gather that this is seen as a pivotal album for the Stones.
The whole Brian Jones Question was at a critical stage -- he had founded the band, and still thought he was an important part of it, while Jagger, Richards, and their producer, Oldham, thought very differently; Jones was still contributing to songs meaningfully with his tinkering around with unusual instruments; and Jones's drug use made him unreliable and only intermittently productive.
Stylistically, this album marks a shift away from blues covers toward originals, greater variety of sound and style, and toward the prevalent tastes in the singles market of the moment.
So, the album marks a significant transitional moment.
Musically, the album is interesting in a number of ways. Lyrically, there are problems, which are not restricted to Under My Thumb.
There is also the US vs UK version of the album thing, an annoying and regular feature of the mid 1960s (Paint It Black on the US version, Mother's Little Helper on the UK).
I think I've listened to this before, and it failed to make much impact on me. They have cleaned up the sound significantly, which is a welcome feature.
Going Home is an unexpected triumph. I Am Waiting is another surprise standout. I like Lindsey Buckingham's version of that one.
Not an easy album to evaluate in some respects, but -- I think I have to respect what it has to offer, at the same time that I have long thought Under My Thumb is problematic (while its marimba sound makes it the most interesting thing on the album musically), and have long thought that Mother's Little Helper is obnoxiously judgemental about something that the speaker can not possibly know enough about to take that attitude.

Chris Hillman left The Byrds to carry on the country rock thingamajig in a series of bands, starting with the charmingly named FBB. This album has a great title, but that's the only thing about it that's great.
Solid / competent playing, non-good vocals, ordinary songs -- at times, highly dated. It's ok. Eh.
Now that I've actually (finally) listened to some of the Hillman country-rock projects that I only read about in my youth, I'm increasingly mystified as to why record executives kept releasing these albums, and why the Rolling Stone Record Guide documented every step of this bland, boring journey.

I grew up detesting John Wayne and Elvis Presley, the appeal of each of whom I found totally elusive and mysterious, and each of whom the mainstream culture that soon enough would start lionizing nostalgically the villain Reagan insisted on forcing on the rest of us at every turn.
My attitudes have softened over time (for Wayne and Presley; they have hardened toward Ronnie). Still ... not interested in this at all.
It actually turns out to be better than I expected it to be, but ... not enough to change the picture.

A crucial document in American music history.
Also a decidedly mixed listening experience.
With early, groundbreaking work in any genre there is a certain amount of grace the listener needs to bring to the listening experience. That's baked in here.
I never listened to this band in my formative days. I remember The Message being huge. I think I heard it here and there on the radio, but mainly from other people singing, NY, NY big city of dreams ...
I was expecting this to be a two turntables and a microphone record. It is not. The arrangements are reasonably full, the music built out into a richer palette than I expected.
The first four songs are all interesting. Hearing GM Flash interact with Genius of Love, Rapture, and It's a Shame is really interesting. The sampling and construction of the music itself is fascinating. None of it is great, but it's highly functional ... it's engaging. And of course groundbreaking.
Then we get to Dreamin' (Quite Terrible and Seemingly Interminable) and having finally endured that, it's followed up with You Are (More of the Same). Good God. Those two songs are bad.
Then the centerpiece, The Message. Outside of its famous "city of dreams / not always what it seems" bit, this is really not a good song.
As with so much of the album, the vocals are just not good. And I think the performances are made to sound worse by the recording of them. We will never know. So thin, and not great at working within the music's timing, and ... lame much of the time, as far as writing. The vocals are just not good.
Adventures is a fascinating tapestry, but ... kind of a grab bag, too. Overall, this album just isn't a great listen; throughout, it is hit or miss, cheek by jowl, soup to nuts.
Bonus sidebar: Skip McDonald, Doug Wimbish, and Keith LeBlanc are all on this record. After playing in the Sugarhill Records house band, they went on to do a lot of work for On-U Sound, especially as Tackhead, as well as solo projects, session work (including with the Rolling Stones -- who hired vocalist Bernard Fowler on a permanent basis, putting an end to Tackhead), and in the fascinating ambient-dub-blues group Little Axe. Both together and separately, they each had a really interesting career after this record.
Skip McDonald is for my money criminally underappreciated. I went through a period of watching a slew of youtube videos about This many or That many guitarists who ... should be better known, were left off some list of the greatest, blah, blah ... his name never comes up. Great musician.

I knew Prima's name, but almost nothing about him. This is an odd blend of very solid swing orchestra jazz and Rat Pack goofballery. Kind of entertaining, kind of dumb. Eh.
I would have been okay with going to my grave without hearing this album.

Very talented performer, sophisticated compositions ... I just don't connect with this material. It's not doing it for me.

Never participated in the Jeff Buckley moment. I feel like his actual career is overshadowed by the sad story of his death and the eerie parallel with his father's death.
This album is ok. It failed throughout to engage me.
Hallelujah and Buckley's preferred mode converge perfectly on his version here. I think that arises from their shared theatricality. Which I don't like in either case. So ... two things that are not for me get together and converge seamlessly to make something a lot of people love.
But ... I got restless and skipped to the next song on every one of these. Hallelujah included.

Maddening and frustrating. The first song seems ok -- kinds like this. Hmm. By the third song, it's -- How much wobbly guitar playing and incompetent singing are we supposed to sit through? Plus, bleeping stupid "word play" in the lyrics. Gaaaahhhh.
Books of Moses -- hey, that one is actually pretty good.
But Lawrence of Euphoria is inexcusable. (Clocks in at only 1:31? As Kumail Nanjani said to John Oliver in that HBO promo years ago, It feels longer.)
Grey/Afro is a game changer. That is actually good. Remarkable. Really, really good. Except ... I thought this was going to end two minutes ago. What's happening? 9:38 ?!?!?! Good Lord.
Then it feels absolutely interminable because is rolls right into This Time He Has Come, which I thought was still the same song, and so adding another 4:42 ... it's like a 14 minute suite. Holy something or other. Too Much !!!!
I didn't understand why this is so long, but now I'm looking at the Wikipedia page, and I'm well into the bonus tracks. So, that's on me at this point.
The real mystery is how it has maintained this mystique over the years. It seems like you have two factors that may be active here: the legend around the recording -- people just love a magnum opus delivered from the farther shore, delivered from beyond the limits of sanity (see: persistent efforts to believe Syd Barrett did something revelatory after he was dropped from Pink Floyd). And then we could place this album among a modest but substantial group of recordings in which artists discover possibilities -- DIY, raw / simplified, radically beyond questions of technical excellence ... etc. There are things that inspire artists by suggesting new possibilities, by departing so thoroughly from the surrounding contemporary landscape. This is a different question from, Is this a good album that one enjoys listening to?
Anyway ... always good to learn of a fresh historical curiosity, but ... I dunno. This feels like a practical joke played on its audience by The Book.
2.5 stars

This is a great album. Stereolab doesn't share much with Steely Dan, but both bands have a history of releasing albums with surprisingly infelicitous cover designs. This is a solid example. The Lab also have some terrible videos out there on the YouTubes. They're remarkable on the Audio, not so much the Visual.
Stereolab put out a lot of music over a ten year period, and many, many good songs. Also many "tried something interesting, and ... here it is" songs. As a result, their albums are generally a mixed bag. (And admirers often have very different ideas about which is the good stuff.) Their two most successful albums start to finish are Mars Audiac Quintet and Emperor Tomato Ketchup (which title, disappointingly, is simply lifted from the title of a Japanese film -- sort of like My Life In the Bush of Ghosts).
I found Stereolab during the Aughts by messing around on Allmusic with the "similar bands" feature on somebody's page. This was said to be the pivotal masterpiece by the Allmusic reviewer. I bought it and haven't looked back. Fascinating band.
The songs that really drew me in as I was first listening to ETK were Metronomic Underground and Les Yper-Sound. The former shows up in a magnificent live-at-the-BBC performance on ABC Music. It's a bit like going from the great, long songs on Remain In Light side one to the even greater live versions on The Name of This Band Is Talking Heads. The latter (Les Yper), oddly, is I think uniformly ignored on compilations (outside of a pretty lame version on ABC.) Actually, there are some other great songs of theirs that don't get anthologized, too. Their compilations are perhaps as dodgy as their album covers.
One striking feature of Stereolab is that they always sound the same, or like their own very distinctive selves ... but exercise remarkable imagination and ingenuity in finding new and different ways to get there. This album displays that quality to a great extent. Lots of different sounds, very cohesive feel.
This album opens with four great songs (Metronomic; Cybele's Reverie -- which for some reason shows up on all the compilations, even though ... anyway; Percolator, and Yper). From there, it's just one variation on how to be a goofball arty post punk inheritor of the VU / krautrock avant rock lineage after another.
Whenever I listen to this album, it's a string of "oh, yeah -- this one; I forgot how good this is" moments, one after another. Noise of Carpet! The stately grace of Tomorrow Is Already Here. The title track ... so many songs, so good.
The exceptions for me are Monstre Sacre, which I think is meant to be atmospheric and mysterious, but which I find to be meandering and dull; and Slow Fast Hazel, which is unfortunate, because as their career went on, that became a kind of default for them -- they started doing at lease one new version of more or less that song per album. Many critics praise Sound Dust highly; not me. That thing is dull. It's full of Slow Fast Hazel reiterations.
Still -- this is a long album. Out of 13 songs, 11 are really good. Two are just ok.
Great album. All the stars. Message me privately for a Stereolab playlist.

Don't listen to much Beck ... I have him down as irritating. I am biased against him because I made the mistake of watching this video once where he stands on a circular stage in the middle of a sea of musicians and keeps sweeping his arm to get a bunch of them to play, and then again to silence them. And stuff. It's supposed to be a "reimagining" of Sound and Vision, a wonderful Bowie song. It just seemed to me like an obnoxious display of narcissism. So, I'm not necessarily going to give him a fair hearing. Anyway -- Here we go.
Beck's finely honed technical precision and unshakeable integrity as an artist allow him to maintain the tightrope tension between engaging and irritating over the full expanse of this album.
Expecting a listener to endure that for an hour is a big ask.
The New Pollution is pretty successful. Ditto, Derelict. Novacane is extra irritating. It's a push-pull seesaw with Yin and Yang jostling for supremacy in a zero sum game of equilibria.
This can take a variety of forms. When Where It's At started, I thought, Oh, yeah, I know this -- this is a good one. By 4 minutes in, I thought, Is this still going?!?
I kept thinking it was all percussion and guitar, though close listening reveals very nice sounding bass parts. They're just too low in the mix for the most part. Don't like that. Needs the bass.
This album is fine. But ... eh. 2.5 stars
Bonus Ironic Twist: I really like Deadweight, but that as it turns out is a bonus track.

Periodically I try to listen to this album, and it turns out it's still long, boring, and a failure. And impossible to get through. Because it's so boring. And a failure.
There seem to be people in the world who think it's good. (It's on this list, for example.) To my mind, that is one of the great mysteries of our world. And a fascinating study in human perversity.
I will give it a whirl, yet again, for the sake of The Project and its impact on our collective human knowledge.
Sara is a good one, and Tusk is great -- one of my favorite songs. Over and Over, despite some nice guitar work, is more an example of what's wrong with Christine McVie than what's right.
Walk a Thin Line is pretty good (there's another version, on Mick Fleetwood's album The Visitor; that album is really interesting and well worth a listen -- a real hidden gem).
The album is going along ... okay, not bad, not great ... and then we get to What Makes You Think You're the One, and the wheels really fall off.
I enjoy much of Lindsey Buckingham's solo work, so I'm not opposed to Strange Lindsey who has turned away from Seventies LA hitmaking. I just don't find that these songs are compelling. To me, this album has many mediocre, filler songs and not enough standout songs. And that's especially problematic in an album that is so long. I just don't get how people like this album.

The Doors do it all. Rock. Psychedelic rock. Funk. Chicago blues. Country folkie rock.
Weddings, parties, anything. Rate fifteen dollars a day. Bongo jazz a speciality. (a la Revolution Rock)
And to borrow from the Player in Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead:
I can do you organ and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you organ and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the organ. Organ is compulsory -- they're all organ, you see ...
For many, many years, I've been enjoying the sample of Morrison's voice on Stoned Immaculate by Dub Syndicate. Thanks to the 1001 Album Generator project, today at last I heard the song from which is is lifted. Thanks, Generator!

Never really graduated from PIL curious to actually engaging with them. Bought one of their later albums, listened to it once, and ... eh. The real story is the first phase, when Jah Wobble and Keith Levene were still involvedAnd I've never checked out those records.
This album is very good. I can see how it would be a touchstone for all sorts of arty-dissonant bands. The songs are long, and it's challenging to stick with this for an hour. But this stuff is legit.
Careering sounds remarkably akin to Gang of Four. (Graveyard, too.)
The bass is strong throughout, which is appreciated. Socialist is an especially notable example of that. The bass grounds the noise and gives it a flow.
I'm more familiar with Keith Levene from his work with the On-U Sound label, which shows how niche listening can really skew your perspective. Since he's obviously much better known as the PIL guitarist.
Kind of amazing to read about his career on wikipedia -- he was a founding member of the Clash, and loved prog rock, having come to the punk scene in London fresh off a stint as a roadie for Yes (at age 15! Close To The Edge tour -- He's quoted saying Steve Howe is The Best Guitarist). That is a singular human being.
Speaking of On-U Sound, Levene played on the first Singers and Players record, War of Words, and Bad Baby has a similar dense, compressed sound to the songs on that album. That's intriguing. But a superficial glance at the credits doesn't reveal any overlap in either the studios or engineers involved.
Word association is funny -- when this album popped up as the album of the day, I immediately went from Public Image Limited to a brief review in the Rolling Stone Record Guide, which lodged in my memory forty years ago, give or take: I immediately thought, "It's hard to believe Jah Wobble was kicked out of PIL for taking these tapes" ... the text in question is, "Hard to imagine that Wobble was really expelled from Public Image Ltd for appropriating these particular tracks (which Messrs. Lydon and Levene still claim were corporate property). Maybe it's just that what Wobble uses to overlay the basic doom-rock of PIL's conception isn't very interesting. No reason for any but complete PIL fanatics to hear this." (The Jah Wobble entry in this 1983 publication consists simply of this 3 star review of his 1980 release, The Legend Lives On: Jah Wobble in Betrayal.)
The human brain is wacky. I can't have looked at that for 35 years at least. And there's no reason I should have read it at all ... there's nothing else on that page that I was particularly interested in, and I had no idea who Jah Wobble was in the mid-80s.

This seems like the same old West Coast rap story ... excellent beats, competent but unexceptional vocals, tiresome and unpleasant lyrical content.
Not sure I'll finish this. The Gil Scott Heron (and others) pastiche (For Free) is grotesque. It is maddening when these artists show that they know their musical history, and then choose to do ... [insert example of misogynistic claptrap and lazy mosaic of cuss words]. Misdirected talents. Argh.
Listening to the end was a tiresome slog.
The guest vocalist with the gruff voice on Blacker the Berry is the best things on the album
i is actually good. This comes as a great surprise, after what has preceded it

Beautiful album, tremendous musicians -- everyone loves Paul Chambers, but I think it remains true that he is underappreciated; that's the nature of playing bass. But -- all the more reason to emphasize how great he was.
This album is hugely famous, and it sounds great. I'm not a sufficiently sophisticated listener to really get the significance of modal jazz, and all the technical stuff.
So, I have to take the experts' word for it that this is amazing from the point of view of practitioners. But, y'know, sounds good to me.

I feel like I live in a world -- or did, for awhile, starting in the mid to late 90s and alsting about a decade, where I am supposed to like Portishead. I'm not sure where that came from. The details are sketchy. In any case, I never did listen to them.
I think it's fun that there is a place in the UK, in the Bristol-Cardiff zone, called Portishead and which I believe gives the band its name.
Probably spurred by the Apple Music top 100 albums of all time list, on which this album appears, several months ago I attempted to settle the very urgent Portishead Question by actually listening to some of their music. it didn't go great.
And it's not going great now. It's just ... boring. The singing is fine, kind of mannered, kind of slow not to say semi tortured .. not much to it, just a line over the bed. It doesn't do much. There aren't really songs exactly. More atmospheres.
And the music ... it's so ... boring. It's just beds. It doesn't go anywhere, do anything. If you took off the vocals, the music would be perfect to talk over when you do a break on your radio show. It's just there, kind of cool, not doing anything ... it won't get in your way.
Roads and Pedestal are better. Solid tracks. Biscuit is awful. Like, "is this a joke?" awful.
There are so many better versions of what (I gather) this is supposed to be and do. I do not get it.
Listen to former Bristol roofer turned vocalist and vegetarian crank Gary Clail instead. Emotional Hooligan if you can find it. But you won't because it's not available on the streaming services (who's a crank now?)

People I know and respect like Elvis Costello albums from his, ah, mature phase. But I saw this pop up and said, "Oh, for f#@&k's sake" out loud. I am not a believer in .... what I recently realized is "all the albums Elvis Costello recorded without Nick Lowe producing" ... which is suggestive, in terms of understanding the sneaky genius of Nick Lowe.
When I unsuccessfully attempted to become a record reviewer for my campus weekly newspaper as a first year student, I was told to go find a new album and review it. That album turned out to be Spike, and I tried to do a good job, but ... something didn't click. My big take there was that all of the songs are pretty good, but then they go on too long. If they had been made punchy 3-ish minute songs, he might have had something. That take shows up here, where repeatedly in the first minute, I think, Hey, ok, this sounds pretty good. And by the end I'm like, Are we still doing this? Jeez.
A story oft repeated in my life comes from the time in 1987 when my best friend and I went to see Elvis C, on his King of America tour if memory serves, at the Orpheum in Boston. (The anecdote isn't really about EC; it's about us lying on the floor of my friend's family living room in front of the tv, at the time stated on the tickets as the concert's scheduled start time, saying, Yeah, we'll leave fairly soon, and his mom saying, You two are a couple of beauts -- if you were any more laid back, you'd be dead. Which still strikes me as a pretty good line.
That concert was not altogether satisfactory. Kind of erratic. He was dodgy, hard to follow, ragged ... the whole thing was uneven. But the conceit (gimmick) was that there was this Wheel of Fortune type thing he would spin to determine the next song they would play. Very "look at me," but not great flow, concert-wise. Even assuming the wheel was not rigged to follow a set playlist. I didn't love that concert, but didn't really have a developed take on it. (Bonus aside: I bought a t shirt that night that not only didn't fit me ... I don't think it was tailored to human proportions. I think a medium to large sized dog would maybe have been able to wear it.)
Looking back, it strikes me that what I was picking up on is a tendency in Costello to be very self-satisfied and think that whatever he does will work because he's him. And that shows up on this album, too -- especially in the word play that he seems to think is So, So Clever. [Eye roll] And it shows up in the huge volume of albums he has recorded since ... pick a date between 1985 and 1990 ... in which he repeats himself, recording new versions of the same songs endlessly, generally without the deft, punchy pop song effect that to my mind his whole successful career depended on.
So -- I think I have not believed in Costello really since that concert. And this just adds to the illustrative examples.
There are moments. Not a lot of songs that work start to finish. Clown Strike is pretty good.
But consider Rocking Horse Road: it starts, and I'm thinking, with relief, Hey, ok -- we've got something here. And by the end, I said aloud, to the air around me, The pacing is f*&$king killing me. (referring not to this song as much as -- all. the. goddamn. songs. Had it up to here!
And for me, that's the whole EC story for the last 40 years. It's hard to believe that someone could like This Year's Model as much as I do, and be irked by Brutal Youth as much as I was today.

Never really listened to Country Joe. When I first learned of his existence, in the early-mid 80s, he seemed to me to be hopelessly a relic of the Sixties and not tenable in our modern world.
Listening to this album, expecting that to be only more the case ... I still said "Oh, good lord" out loud as I was listening to the first couple of tracks.
The wacky LBJ song is sort of fun, and connects to the Fixin To Die Rag about the Vietnam War, the song that Country Joe is best known for.
I don't think anyone ever needed to listen to this, but we certainly don't need to in the 21st century. I think Woodstock nostalgia alone can account for this album's inclusion in The Book.

A classic ... I have long thought of this as a principal example of the difference between the true Stones fans and the casual fans who like their singles ... when I last listened to this album, I loved the two big singles on this album, but found the rest to be a mixed bag to which I was fairly indifferent. But I have a friend who is a Stones true believer and thinks the whole thing is great.
Listening to this for the first time in a long time, I find that it holds up. I enjoyed all the songs. The playing is very strong. And it's interesting to hear the seeds of Exile On Main Street in a lot of these songs. Thanks, 1001 Albums Generator!
I see that this is their first album with Jimmy Miller producing. To my mind, all of the truly great material they recorded was with Miller ... not all. But most. He was kind of their George Martin, but in a sneaky, lowkey way -- you don't hear a lot about him.

I don't understand why this album receives such high praise. Yes, it's where it all started, but ... It -- early Who music -- is consistently hit or miss.
What is on here that you want to hear and wouldn't pick up simply by listening to their singles album covering this period, Meaty, Beaty, Big, and Bouncy? The Good's Gone -- good song. The Ox is pretty cool. Eh. Not a lot.
Good album, but -- let's not get carried away.